Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (17 page)

From Maui, Joseph boarded the USS
Middleton LST
in January 1944. LST stood for “landing ship, tank.” Compared to regular troop transport ships, which carried only the troops, the LST’s carried both the troops and their amphibian tractors. The LST’s also had shallower bottoms for advancing closer to the beaches. The USS
Middleton LST
steamed toward the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific. Joseph had little idea where his ship was taking him.

The first assignment of the 22nd Regiment was to wait in reserve behind another amphibious corps as it assaulted the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Marshall Islands. After eight days, the corps seized the atoll from the Japanese on February 8, 1944, with no need of reinforcements. Accordingly, U.S. commanders assigned the 22nd Regiment to the next step in the American march across the Pacific: the Eniwetok Atoll of the northwestern Marshall Islands.

Eniwetok is a typical Central Pacific atoll, an almost circular ring of islands around a lagoon. The total land area of the Eniwetok Atoll is about 2.25 square miles. Dozens of small islets flank the three principal islands of Eniwetok, Engebi, and Parry.

The Japanese had built a 4,000-foot runway on Engebi and fortified several of the islands with tunnels and pillboxes. The pillboxes were semi-spherical concrete bunkers, each shielding one or two snipers while giving them a single hole for aiming and firing.

The 22nd Regiment received its orders to take the atoll.

“
I probably went to Confession aboard ship,” said Joseph. “The military was very good about providing chaplains. I just said my prayers and put my life in God’s hands. I knew that if it was God’s will, I’d survive. If not, I hoped I was in a state of grace.”

At about 8 a.m. on February 18, 1944, Joseph and the thousands of other men from the 1st and 2nd battalions in his regiment piled into the amphibian tractors that were lined up inside the belly of the LST. About 18 to 20 men squeezed aboard each tractor.

At about 8:30 a.m., the lower front of the LST opened wide, like a yawning mouth exposing its huge tongue to the open sea. The tractors rolled down the ramp, building up as much momentum as possible, and aimed toward the lagoon side of the island with the prized runway: Engebi. The plan of attack was to overrun the beach on the southern face of the island where the Japanese defenses were weakest and then to seize the rest of the island, which was about a mile in length and shaped like a triangle.

The tractors stormed the beach at 8:42 a.m. Half the men went in one direction. Half went in the other. Joseph and his partner strung the telephone wire from coconut trees or just in the low brush along the ground in places where there were no trees. The Marines swept across the island, killing more than 1,000 Japanese fighters. A few enemy snipers remained hiding in the pillboxes and tunnels. But according to Joseph, the enemy snipers were left behind to contend with the mop-up operations of the U.S. Army. The Marines completed their mission in six hours.

“
We surprised them,” Joseph said. “We just overpowered them with our superior armaments and numbers. We didn’t fool around. We made short work of it there.”

He didn’t kill anyone. The front-line assault troops had done the job. He returned to the luxuries aboard ship. Cold water from the drinking fountain. Hot food from the kitchen.

The next day, Joseph’s infantry company helped the 3rd battalion of his regiment seize the largest island in the atoll: Eniwetok. He remembers the invasion as almost a replay of the previous day. Army and Marine battalions and tanks continuously smashed through the enemy defenses. Sporadic fighting lasted for two days before the island was secured.

Possibly, Joseph was spared the worst of the fighting on the Eniwetok Atoll. Other platoons and companies from his regiment were assigned to seize Parry Island on February 22. Parry Island turned out to be the Japanese headquarters on the atoll and to be more heavily fortified than the other islands. The Japanese had constructed coconut-log retaining walls to shield the headquarters from naval gunfire. It took the Marines ten and a half hours of bitter fighting to subdue the island.

On February 23, the Eniwetok Atoll belonged to the Americans. About 3,400 Japanese had been killed, compared with 299 Americans, including 184 Marines from the 22nd Regiment.

Neither side took prisoners. Logistics wouldn’t allow it. There were no facilities for any Japanese prisoners aboard the U.S. ships, and the Japanese had nowhere to put any captured Americans. There were three options. Kill the enemy. Be killed. Or commit suicide.

The 22nd Regiment sailed south for Guadalcanal to build a new camp and to await new orders. As he crossed the equator aboard the USS
Warren LST
, Joseph pulled out his tin cup, etched the word MARSHALLS into it, and engraved two five-sided stars in front of the word, commemorating the two beachhead invasions in which he had just participated. The skirmishes on the Eniwetok Atoll of the northwestern Marshall Islands, however, were merely training exercises for what lay ahead.

As Joseph and his buddies swam at the beach on Guadalcanal, momentous plans were being made for them. Two veteran Marine regiments—the 4th, which had occupied the island of Emirau, and the 22nd, which had seized the Eniwetok Atoll—were merged on Guadalcanal in late March 1944 to form the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. It would be the mission of this new brigade—combined with the even larger forces of the 3rd Marine Division—to recapture Guam, the southernmost of the Mariana Islands, and to liberate its 24,000 people from the Japanese.

Guam had been a U.S. territory since the Spanish-American War of 1898. But on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they attacked Guam. The island fell to the Japanese two days later.

During their occupation of Guam, the Japanese had fortified the island with caves, tunnels, and pillboxes. The caves concealed artillery guns that guarded the coastline. The tunnels sheltered Japanese troops and armaments. The pillboxes, like those throughout the Pacific, shielded Japanese snipers so they could fire at will at the invaders.

If the Marines could conquer Guam, an island about 30 miles long and 9 miles wide, they would reestablish an American foothold in the Western Pacific. They would also avenge the loss of the small Marine Corps garrison that had fallen there to the Japanese in the early days of the war.

The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade trained and rehearsed for two months in preparation for the battle. The amphibian tractors, loaded with men and equipment, repeatedly rolled down the LST ramps into the water and maneuvered toward the beaches of Guadalcanal. Air and naval bombing exercises pounded the landing area, duplicating the procedures planned for Guam. Joseph and the other men knew they were being primed for a major battle.

They toasted one another in the canteen on Guadalcanal. “One hundred years!” Joseph raised his glass in a traditional Polish salute to his American brethren. “May you live 100 years!”

After a few rounds, the lightheaded but heavy-hearted Marines slipped into a couple choruses of the melancholy “Whiffenpoof Song.” Their singing was equal parts comical, prayerful, and self-deprecatory:

Father Joe wrote frequently from Michigan. One time, he sent Joseph a “miraculous medal” of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Joseph attached the religious medal, which was about the size of an almond, to the same silver chain that held his two military dog tags, which were about the size of quarters. Joseph wore the chain around his neck, with the dog tags and miraculous medal falling together under his front shirt. Another time, Father Joe sent a scapular, which consisted of two small pieces of cloth, each about the size of a postage stamp, connected by a circular brown string. The two pieces of cloth bore the symbols of Jesus and Mary. Joseph wore the scapular around his neck as well, with the two pieces of cloth falling backward beneath his collar. He felt the Blessed Virgin Mary protecting both his front and his back, thanks to Father Joe.

“
Next to God himself and the Blessed Virgin Mary,” said Joseph, “Father Joe was the one who gave me hope, because he was praying for me every day. Imagine what it was like on those islands to receive letters from a priest assuring you that he keeps you in his prayers like his own brothers.”

Religious faith sustained many of the Marines, according to Joseph. “The devotions to God and country definitely reinforced one another. We needed to pray and have God’s help to live. To survive. In the Marines, as a general rule, there was no such thing as an atheist. At least not when we were going into battle.”

The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade shipped out from Guadalcanal in early June 1944. The invasion of Guam was originally scheduled for June 18, just three days after another Marine invasion of Saipan. The prolonged battle for Saipan, however, forced the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade to remain afloat as a mobile reserve about 100 miles off Saipan, postponing the landing on Guam. The brigade idled for 15 days aboard the cramped LST’s, each passing day a worrisome reminder that the battles against Japanese forces were growing fiercer and fiercer with each passing island in what was becoming a grueling U.S. slog toward the Japanese homeland. When finally released on June 30, the brigade floated to Eniwetok Island to replenish its supplies after a tiresome month at sea.

A couple weeks later, Joseph boarded the USS
LST 479
, his brigade once again heading for Guam. Navy and Marine Corps officers announced over the loudspeakers that Guam would be an easy victory, because the navy ships and army aircraft were bombing the hell out of the island.

The invasion of Guam called for landing the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade at Agat Beach on the mountainous southwest coast of the island, just south of the town of Agat. The brigade’s mission was to secure the beachhead and then to turn north to capture the Orote Peninsula—the Japanese stronghold—which contained both an airfield and the old Marine Corps garrison. The brigade would hit the beach in two waves. An army regiment waiting offshore would stand by as a backup third wave. The plans called for the 3rd Marine Division, meanwhile, to land on the northwest coast of the island, to secure the northern beachhead, and then to swing southeast. The combined forces of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade and the 3rd Marine Division would then, like the thumb and fingers of a coiling fist, theoretically seize the rest of the island.

As the ships rounded the southern tip of Guam on the hot, muggy morning of July 21, 1944, the rugged volcanic mountain range loomed forbiddingly over the palm-dotted lowlands along the coast. To the southeast, the Japanese antiship guns that had been positioned high in the caves on Mount Alifan aimed directly down at the invaders. To the northwest, the Japanese artillery that had been planted in the hills of the Orote Peninsula commanded the landing beach near Agat. Right above the beach, concrete pillboxes were constructed into the coral cliffs, each pillbox at least a foot thick around except for its malevolent slit. In the middle of the 2,000-yard landing beach, concrete blockhouses with 75-mm and 37-mm field guns were camouflaged beneath foliage and sand mounds. The sand itself was pocked with mines and studded with booby traps.

Coral reefs stood in the way of reaching the beach at all. Roughly 500 yards across from sea to shore, the reefs were the widest and most dangerous reefs yet encountered in the American advance across the Pacific. Marine commanders doubted whether the amphibian tractors could traverse the reefs and crawl ashore through the heavy firepower that the Japanese defenders were capable of delivering. Even if the first waves of men could establish a beachhead, there was no assurance that supplies could then be transported across the treacherous, surf-covered reefs.

During the alphabetical roll call of his 40-member platoon, Joseph and three of his closest buddies listened for their names: Fleetmeyer, Godzisz, Haas, Heusel. “Here!” each shouted. They were assigned to the second wave. It would follow the first wave by about five minutes.

Shortly after 6:30 a.m., Joseph climbed from the ramp of the LST and onto one of the amphibian tractors. It rolled into the water and steered toward the seaward edge of the reef. Joseph and the other men who were crammed into the tractor became very quiet. The tractor lurched forward, then bucked and stalled on the coral.

Japanese cannon fire from the caves in the mountains rained down upon the reef. The tractor kept scraping and jolting over the jagged coral. The enemy fire kept falling.

Joseph and some of the other younger privates hit the deck and started praying. “Heavenly creator,” Joseph implored, “preserve our lives. Protect us from harm.”